Saturday, 24 May 2014

‘The Furnace’ by Rose Macaulay

Novelists get understandably cross when readers make the naïve
mistake of identifying them with their characters. There are however some cases
where it’s justified: everyone (well, everyone who’s read, or claims to have
read, ‘À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ or its excellent English translation by
Scott Moncrieff ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, or even the bad new English
translation called ‘In Search of Lost Time’) knows that ‘Marcel’ is Marcel Proust
himself.

The protagonists of Graham Greene’s novels are not really
Graham Greene, but except in some of the books he called ‘Entertainments’ they
are nearly all tormented by the conflict between the things they want to do —
often quite natural things, not reprehensible by normal humane standards — and
the demands of a strict externally imposed moral code; that of the Roman
Catholic Church. I think it’s fair to assume that Greene himself had the same problem.

As did Rose Macaulay. Indeed this torture must be common to
all who try to reconcile intelligent independent thought with Roman
Catholicism. Macaulay is now best known, perhaps only known, for ‘The Towers of
Trebizond’, which starts hilariously with the loan of a camel, contains a
surreal episode in which a dog is taught to drive a car, and ends tragically. I
have just read her much earlier novel ‘The Furnace’ which, although in a very
different setting, shares the moral preoccupations of ‘Trebizond’. Perhaps
unfairly — I simply can’t find any other of her books — I’m assuming that
whatever came between these two is more of much the same.

The big difference between Greene and Macaulay might be
described — forgive the strained metaphor — in terms of cookery. In Greene’s
novels, the ‘want’ bits and the ‘must’ bits are cooked together into a stew
that even those moral degenerates who rely on their own consciences rather than
the Pope’s — protestants, atheists, humanists, nothing-in-particular-ists —
find tasty and nourishing.

Macaulay in contrast hasn’t bothered with the cooking: she’s
just given us the ingredients. What’s worse, she’s given them to us in the
wrong order: first the cloying sweetness of people enjoying themselvesin frankly silly ways, then the very nearly
inedible lump of raw meat of the come-uppance.

That said, I did enjoy ‘The Furnace’. The moral conflict is
crude, but the incompatibilities of character and class Macaulay uses to
present that conflict are subtly, allusively, handled. If you can’t find a
print copy you can download it, without charge, from Project Gutenberg.